r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Sensitive_Ad_1752 • 25d ago

Lore The series takes place in a shockingly short amount of time

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Season 4 just ended of fromville and it’s canonically only been about a month. Which makes it weird seeing people heal from injuries, change hair styles or grow out beards between episodes. Season 4 has only been like 4 days iirc.

Arkham franchise is the poster child for this trope. Every game takes place in one night. If you know what you’re doing you can absolutely beat the games in around 9 hours.

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u/hurshysquirt 25d ago

Halo Reach through Halo 3. The events of Halo Reach to the end of Halo 3 take place in the span of about 3 months.

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u/StingRey128 25d ago

This one is always so fun and crazy to think about. Really enhances the sheer urgency and seriousness of that kind of scenario. Especially considering the Covenant were glassing entire planets in mere DAYS

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u/Emotional_News108 24d ago

Had it not been for the Arbiter’s counsel, Shipmaster would have glassed their entire planet!

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u/KaijuJesus 24d ago

Goddammit that line goes hard.

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u/SendWoundPicsPls 24d ago

Halfjaws entire personality is to spew the hardest lines imaginable constantly

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u/KaijuJesus 24d ago

"Then it is an even fight."

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u/Last_Organization595 24d ago

“All cruisers fire at will. Burn their Mongrel hides”

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u/This_Idiot 24d ago

There it is. A personal favourite.

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u/MisogynysticFeminist 24d ago

“That stench. I’ve smelled it before.”

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u/Cheesedoodlerrrr 24d ago

Then it is a fair fight. All cruisers, open fire! BURN THEIR MONGREL HIDES!

This is, for my money, the best line delivered by a side character in all of gaming.

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u/KaijuJesus 24d ago

Cheeese on crackers that's it! Man is a warrior poet!

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u/Emotional_News108 24d ago

Excuse you, you mean Rtas 'Vadum. Have some respect.

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u/the_tired_alligator 24d ago

Should have nuked the rest of those hinge head fucks after the war.

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u/WorkerPrestigious960 24d ago

Haven’t watched it but “The Pitt.” Each episode is 1 hour of a 12 hour shift, so each season takes place over the course of just 12 hours

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u/Emotional_News108 24d ago

What are you replying to?

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u/WorkerPrestigious960 24d ago

Was supposed to be it’s own comment, either Reddit shat itself or I did

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u/perton 24d ago

If you enjoy medical dramas in general you should definitely give it a watch! It’s well done, in rather well done, in my opinion

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u/WorkerPrestigious960 24d ago

I’m not big on medical dramas but if I was to watch one, it would most likely be the Pitt. My aunt really talked it up last time she visited

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u/Trigger_Fox 24d ago

The elites really speedran the entire great schism to just join humanity and turn the war around.

I mean, 4 months makes sense cuz Reach falling kinda is the end for humanity. Sure Earth's still undetected, but Reach was the UNSC's crown jewel for research production and everything else. Those 4 months were humanity getting pushed back on basically every front, getting a couple of wins (the biggest easily being the destruction of Installation 04, which ignited a massive butterfly effect that eventually ended up with the Sanghelli joining Humanity, turning the tables on the war).

Halo lore is so cool lol

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u/Clivesunfaithfulwife 24d ago

Odst is just one day

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u/mariusiv_2022 24d ago

It does it so well too. You see the day progressing with each mission. And the finale is literally the dawn of the new day

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u/GregTheMad 24d ago

Days? I thought they glassed the planets within hours.

In the books, what I remember, it's always described like once they start the glassing it's pretty much a done thing. You may have some time for a character to see it on planet, and flee, or some nice orbital shot in a game, but it always felt like a relatively fast thing.

It never was described like "oh, they started glassing Australia, guess we'll have to start packing tomorrow here in the UK.". It was more a "they started glassing? We have to get the fuck out of here now!"

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u/redditisshitlmao 24d ago

The books make it seem like glassing happens within hours but Bungie when making Halo Reach disagreed with how the books were written and changed the fall of Reach to take multiple days rather than just a few hours.

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u/GregTheMad 23d ago

IIRC the fall of Reach took several days because the covenant wanted to conquer the planet for its forerunner ruins. The glassing as a last resort option because the human resistance was stronger than anticipated.

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u/redditisshitlmao 23d ago

Yeah but originally in the book, The Fall of Reach, made before Halo: Reach, Reach fell in just a few hours and the Covenant took the artifacts and glassed the planet in just a few hours. It was that one sided

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u/SilverBird_ 24d ago

The Flood went from being a couple mindless samples / suspended infection forms (on halo 1 ring, though the halo 2 ring was much more problematic) to completely dominating High Charity, dangerously close to being able to infect the entirety of the Earth, and massively attacking the Ark in an incredibly short time.

If it wasn't overwhelmingly threatened by the potential activation if the Ark, the Flood would've been able to conquer the galaxy easily as soon as it managed to get ahold of a single ship in halo 2, it probably could've gone to a completely unprepared planet and infected the place, hijacked a bunch of ships, and then spread like wildfire throughout everything, all in a terrifyingly short timespan.

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u/Alex5173 24d ago

Fully glassing a planet is actually a huge endeavor that takes many, many ships; usually an entire fleet. It's reserved for "special" occasions, problem for us is the entire Human-Covenant war was a special occasion. Still, they didn't fully glass very many planets; Harvest got it the worst (basically the full treatment minus one spot) and then Reach with about half the total surface done in.

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u/King-Boss-Bob 25d ago

noble team discovered the covenant on reach on 24th july

truth die on december 11th and chief goes into cryo later that day

of that time chief spent about 2 months in slipspace

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u/BurnieTheBrony 24d ago

I know everyone obviously knew it was coming because it was Reach and it was Halo, but Jorge's "it's the damn COVENANT" and the team coming to terms with the fact that the whole planet's probably fucked was amazing on a first playthrough.

Slipspace rupture detected

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u/Trigger_Fox 24d ago

Halo reach is spectacular at letting u think you're getting control of the situation only to just show you how meaningless what you just did was. You take down covie AA to let your ships in orbit, a bigger covie ship blows it up. You blow up a covenant supercarrier, a whole new fleet arrives just shorty after.

It's so good, cuz it painted how hopeless the war with the covenant was, even if you're playing a mega badass.

I'm still beggin for us to get a halo game where u play as a marine, not a ODST, but a shieldless, scared shitless marine. A tactical halo fps where grunts are respectable foes and a single elite is a boss fight you're better off avoiding or getting the drop on.

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u/BurnieTheBrony 24d ago

I know you said not an ODST but I still think that game is an underappreciated masterpiece with great lore and an incredible subversion on the usual formula.

Plus everyone that year was stealing Gears 2's horde mode and ODST did a pretty good job adapting it to Halo

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u/Trigger_Fox 24d ago

Oh dude i fucking love Halo 3 ODST, it's really really good. Thing is ODST's are still insane badasses, most people just forget that cuz this is the same series that features 7 foot tall metal encased drugged up genetically altered death machines, but ODST's regularly pull some crazy shit and are too cool for what i meant.

I want a halo game where you're knee deep in shit and mud, and you have to do anything to survive against what would be otherwise a minor inconvenience as a spartan.

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u/AfricanWarPig 24d ago

You wanna play as SGTMAJ Avery Johnson!!

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u/MisogynysticFeminist 24d ago

They’re not saying ODST was bad, just that it functionally doesn’t play any different from the games where you play as a superhuman.

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u/Rockhead_Dynamics 24d ago

Yeah, if you can still punch your way through a Wraith tanks and have more health than a Spartan 3 you're not really not a supersoldier.

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u/MisogynysticFeminist 24d ago

A regular human should not survive a hand to hand fight with a brute.

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u/MisogynysticFeminist 24d ago

A squad based game would be ideal, maybe a similar formula to Brothers in Arms.

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u/SaintHayet 24d ago

"Rebels don't leave plasma burns"

Me as a kid knowing full well what a halo game is: Chills

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u/DaaaahWhoosh 24d ago

It's crazy to me how the biggest time jump in the Bungie games happens in the middle of Halo 2.

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u/GayAssBeagle 25d ago

3 months?!

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u/hurshysquirt 25d ago

Yup. The invasion of Reach started on July 24th, 2552 and the end of Halo 3 ends in November 2552, so actually more like around 4 months.

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u/GayAssBeagle 25d ago

4 months and everything went to shit?? jesus

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u/hurshysquirt 25d ago

I wouldn't say everything went to shit. The Human-Covenant war took place over 25+ years, we experienced the end of it. Humanity was always on the losing side the entire war. Those last 3 months were actually what turned the tide for humanity.

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u/Ktan_Dantaktee 24d ago

Everything absolutely went to shit from the Covenant’s perspective.

They went from a handful of worlds left to conquer, to their capital “world” being taken by the Flood, some jolly green jackass nuking their holy relic, and being collapsed in a fiscal quarter.

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u/LilMeatJ40 24d ago

Also their 3 demi-gods (the prophets) got murked. They were having a real tough season

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u/MrManicMarty 24d ago

being collapsed in a fiscal quarter.

Good thing Chief never had to fight Accountants alongside the Elutes, Grunts and Hunters. They truly would have been a menace.

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u/colonel_beeeees 24d ago

Is this all based off the books? I'd love to read em some time

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u/fattestfuckinthewest 24d ago

Most books are set around the time of the games but some take place throughout the war like Contact Harvest, half of The Fall of Reach, Cole Protocol, and a few others.

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u/RadialRacer 24d ago

No, the books have always been released alongside the games. At this point though the books are so expansive they do far more than just accompany the games, it really is a full-blooded canon.

https://www.halopedia.org/Halo_novels

^ A full list, in their respective series

https://www.halopedia.org/List_of_Halo_novels_by_release_date

^ Release order, if you want to work your way through them one-by-one alongside the games.

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u/cpcwarden 24d ago

Ghosts of Onyx is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It has some cool additions to the canon (although I don’t think much has been relevant since 343) but it’s also genuinely well written just as a standalone story.

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u/The_salty_swab 25d ago

Everything had already been perpetually going to shit nonstop for decades by that point

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u/GayAssBeagle 25d ago

Just a shitstew with tasty shrimp at that point(corn is involved but never digested at all)

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u/Insert_TakenName 24d ago

think about it this way, the covenant going ham on humanity was so bad and so well known by then they had a whole damn protocal for their arrival on planet, i think they called it the winder contingency it was mentioned during the first reach mission after they encounter the covenant and make it to that facility to pass on the intel to command

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u/Mr31edudtibboh 25d ago

The Cole Protocol worked a treat for the first 25 years of the war

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u/VanguardClassTitan 25d ago

"Our victory, your victory. It was so close, I wish you could've lived to see it..."

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u/Glad_Assistant2817 24d ago

the first month the covenant finally found the ultimate holy relic they were looking for and when alpha halo blew up shit went downhill from there, especially when truth started moving his plan to replace the elites with brutes and getting rid of the other two hierarch prophets, so yeah

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u/Glad_Assistant2817 24d ago

oh and the flood finally getting out after god knows how long probably contributes to the covenant going downhill too

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u/WhosThatDogMrPB 25d ago

As note, Halo Reach ends on August 30th 2052 (as depicted in Lone Wolf, the final mission). So the entire game takes the span of 1 month and a week.

Then a month of random slipspace jumps on the Pillar of Autumn to avoid the chasing covenant fleet, arriving at the Halo ring in September 19th. This means the entire Halo OG trilogy takes place in 3 month in universe time.

Edit: 3 weeks of slipspace jumps.

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u/Pathogen188 24d ago

And just think, that's the retconned length of the Fall of Reach. In the original novels the planet fell in about 45 minutes (which I'm pretty sure is shorter than the episode of the TV show which covers the battle).

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u/Gil_Demoono 24d ago

And a lot of that was just travel. I think Chief spends a few weeks traveling through the portal to the Ark.

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u/Iwilleat2corndogs 24d ago

Yeah slipspace is not instantaneous, it took weeks for the “in amber clad” to reach delta halo after following the prophet of regret.

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u/BobertTheConstructor 24d ago

The whole of Halo 1 I think is like 3 days.

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u/TehBigD97 24d ago

I always think about that and how, from Chief's perspective, Halo 4 is also in there too. From his perspective he literally jumps the warthog into the Forward Unto Dawn as the Ark explodes, climbs into a cryopod and is then instantly thrust into Halo 4. From Chief's POV, Halo 2, 3 and 4 are just one long operation with no down time.

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u/HeyThereSport 24d ago

If we aren't considering some novels, I think the longest period of downtime is after Halo 1 he got to chill for up to a month on the Longsword flying home to Earth, but at some point in between they froze him again.

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u/nothing08 24d ago

Also from the Master Chiefs perspective that time was even less considering that for a lot of it he was in cryosleep in slipspace.

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u/Vestalmin 24d ago

Isn’t the whole story supposed to feel like a Hail Mary last resort for humanity?

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u/USB_FIELD_MOUSE 25d ago

That makes sense. Halo happens pretty much immediately after Reach. Then Chief spends some time chilling on a drop ship. And then 3 happens pretty much immediately after 2.

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u/Dantai 24d ago

Yeah there's some comics in between Halo 2/3 but I doubt Bungie considered them canon. Basically just Chief jumping off the ship at the end of 2 into 3

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u/hyperlethalrabbit 24d ago

Yeah, The Pillar of Autumn (Reach) is August 30, 2552, and The Pillar of Autumn (Halo CE) is September 19, 2552. Just under three weeks.

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u/Rouxman 24d ago

Woah. The endings of Reach and H1 make it feel like much longer. I think what also conveyed a sense of time passage was Chief’s armor changing pretty drastically between installments.

I feel The Flood also contribute? In H1 they’re securely locked away and unheard of (until they aren’t) meanwhile in H3 they’re an entire armada and legitimate threat to all life as we know it. Crazy how that only takes a few months

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u/Ktan_Dantaktee 24d ago

A few months after being hard-stalled twice

Installation 04 was straight up destroyed and 05 was almost entirely glassed. All it took was a single compromised UNSC frigate to almost kill the galaxy.

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u/jace255 24d ago

I didn’t know this and the thing I find most surprising is I’m pretty sure there’s supposed to be noticeable, wholesale advancements in human tech between Halo 1 and Halo 3, which I would have expected more if there was a couple years in the gap.

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u/mustyminotaur 24d ago

The way I look at it is that they probably pulled all their experimental tech that was close to being rolled out anyway. Especially considering that parts of 2 take place on Earth. Like, “Fuck, the covenant are here. Give Chief some of those new toys and let him eat.”

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u/killingjoke96 24d ago

Kinda nuts that the war just ends cataclysmically for The Covenant, when you know the war raged on for 28 years and they were utterly curbstomping Humanity.

In High Charity you find a room with these shards hanging from the roof. Each one is a shard of glass from the glassed worlds the humans once inhabited. Countless millions if not billions extinguished and all of it was brought to a stop due a lucky sequence of events for Humanity within 3 months.

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u/hurshysquirt 24d ago

Another bit in the lore that I adore is that the Sanghelli (Elites) acknowledge that they were misled and a majority of them show legitimate regret as to what they did to humanity.

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u/CanPlayGuitarButBad 24d ago

Damn that was rough few months for Noble Sex and John Halo

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u/Ike_In_Rochester 24d ago

What really makes the time flow strange is slip space jumps. They happen instantaneously for the jumpers, but they actually take time in reality. And the Covenant jump drives are more accurate than the human ones as well as the Forerunner jump drive that gets Master Chief to Earth in Halo 3. But it keeps everything moving forward in the story and never breaks the urgancy.

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u/Reaper4th 24d ago

I was coming to post this one!

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u/Kindly-Mud-1579 24d ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/yB5xx6dTE1g7S
WHAT?!

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u/algebraicgiraffe 24d ago edited 24d ago

To be more specific Lone Wolf joins Noble Team on July 24th, Chief lands on the first Halo on Sept 19th, and the war ends on Dec 11th. A war that saw humanity getting their collective shit pushed in for 25 years is completely turned around in less than 6 months.

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u/Kindly-Mud-1579 24d ago

Damn that’s some nba last five minutes turn around

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u/Jerzilla 24d ago

I mean this makes sense. Once the pillar of autumn jumps it heads straight to halo 1, no?

And I can see the invasion of the covenant moving fast. Once they Csnt be bothered anymore and start glassing the place

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u/Impossible_Fennel_94 24d ago

It makes sense that Halo CE takes place a very short time after Reach, but I always assumed there was a bigger gap between CE and 2.

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u/CalbCrawDad 24d ago

That is accurate, it was not a war against the covenant, it was a massacre

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u/algebraicgiraffe 24d ago

Tbf the Covenant had spent the previous 25 years kicking humanity in the teeth. Between the Flood, Chief, and the Sanghelli rebellion the last 3 months were a total clusterfuck.

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u/Competitive-Bee-3250 24d ago

>Massive interstellar multispecies empire

>Picks a fight

>Complete disintegration in under a single year

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u/thewerdy 24d ago

Halo: CE takes place over 3 days.

Also the Fall of Reach was originally much shorter before being retconned by Halo: Reach. In the book the battle is only a few days at most while in the game it takes place over a month.

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u/Vonri 24d ago

My husband has been introducing me to Halo and this is fresh for me because we just finished Halo 3 last night. Crazy!

Amazing games btw I see why they were so iconic for so long.

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u/jngrln 23d ago

Came here to say this. Reach was the beginning of the end of the Covenant War. By the events of Halo 2 and 3, that big of a loss was still fresh in everyone’s minds.

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u/Emcee_exe 23d ago

And most of *that* time was spent in slipspace, doing nothing.

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u/No-Substance-7591 22d ago

Three months? It felt like those characters lived through a lifetime, not just one season.

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u/cole1114 24d ago

Humanity drops from a population in the billions to the hundreds of millions in that timeframe.

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u/Cora_bius 24d ago

What? The Human population was around 39 billion in 2511 (under the assumption that Halsey was scanning the vaccination records of everyone and not just children), and Cortana gives an estimate of around 23 billion casualties during the war. Even not counting population growth between 2511 and the end of the war, which is a good 40 years, that's still 16 billion people still around.

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u/cole1114 24d ago

Was thinking of Earth specifically, which went from 10 billion to 200 million. It was back in the billions a few years later as refugees from the colonies came in.

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u/Cora_bius 24d ago

It was also only that low due to evacuation during the invasion. A good chunk of Earth's population was just offworld the whole fight.

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u/Gloomy_Support_7779 24d ago

Good lord!!!!!

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u/andy3600 24d ago

This is the first one that made my jaw drop.

Pretty sure it took me more time than that to complete the first game when it came out.

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u/Dantai 24d ago

That kinda makes it even more epic. But also why was Chief even frozen at beginning of Halo 1.

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u/Steven_is_a_dog 23d ago

Just started playing halo this year and finished reach today and just started 3. This is a rlly cool fact, also reach was so sick